Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Corpora, universals and interference 69
If we could show, then, that translations and comparable originals could
have been drawn from the same text population, i.e. that they are samples
from the same textual universe, this would imply not only that there is no
significant interference but also that there are no (other) linguistic features
which would systematically distinguish translations from originals written in
the same language. In this way, the evidence would be more than sufficient, in
fact too powerful for interference alone, and the case would be overdetermined.
If, on the other hand, translations differ from originals, we cannot conversely
automatically infer that the cause is interference. There may be other reasons,
and so the evidence would be necessary but not sufficient. In short, only if
translations in overall comparison are indistinguishable from similar TL texts,
canwebecertainthattransferplaysnoroleinthem.
If translations are distinguishable on a large scale from non-translated
texts (as the evidence hitherto strongly suggests), an interpretation of the
significance of interference derives from pitting it against universals altogether,
so that the argument runs something like “instead of an universal languageindependent
law, we have ‘pair-wise interference’, that is, interference which
is specific to the language pair in question, and which explains the ‘oddity’ of
translations vs. original target language texts”. This hypothesis, which reflects
Baker’s (1993) concept of universals, despite its opposite stance, would seem
to receive support if a given feature can be observed in both a source text and
a target text, but deviate from that which is typical in the TL. The research
solution might be to start from individual, attested occurrences of interference.
This would also seem to rescue us from the problem of positive transfer:
if the results of transfer are hardly discernible from normal target-language
productions, how do we distinguish the two? Toury (1995: 252) suggests that
“the interference inherent in them becomes evident only when a translation is
confronted with its source”. If the assumed ST feature actually turns out to be
behind the translation, it would seem to support the interpretation that a given
source text has caused the translation (or more accurately, the transfer in the
translation).
Yet, although the reasoning is intuitively satisfactory, it resembles the
earlier assumption in second language acquisition research that the major
cause of difficulties is interference from the learner’s mother tongue (known as
the “contrastive hypothesis”). It followed that the best predictor of interference
problems would be contrastive analysis. However, on closer inspection it
turned out that contrastive analysis was not very successful in predicting
learner errors; as Mitchell and Myles (1998:30) put it: “the majority of errors
could not be traced to the L1, and also [. . .] areas where the L1 should have